When I owned a new Ford, I had a generally positive experience with dealer servicing. Any maintenance I needed was taken care of the same day, and I usually just chilled in the dealer’s (admittedly pretty bare) waiting room. That room even had a window into the service area, where I could peek into the bays to watch my car get worked on.
I haven’t been back to a Ford dealer in at least a decade, but it sounds like things have changed drastically. According to CEO Jim Farley, the company has a massive shortage of mechanics and technicians, leaving service bays open and customers waiting weeks for repairs.
In an interview published with Yahoo Finance earlier this week, Farley laid out the problem by the numbers:
This morning, when I woke up, there were 6,000 bays in our dealerships with no technicians.
[Yahoo Finance:] So can’t get my car fixed?
No. Two weeks. Average wait is two weeks. Not because we don’t have the parts, we don’t have the mechanics.
Two weeks is far worse than the national average, at least going by this extract of J.D. Power’s Customer Service Index (CSI) study from 2024, which analyzed customer satisfaction at dealerships when it comes to stuff like maintenance and repairs. According to that data, the average wait for an appointment for mass-market brands, like Ford, was just 5.2 days.
J.D. Power hasn’t released that statistic from its 2025 data to the public, but overall, Ford ranked 11th out of 18 mass-market brands this year for customer satisfaction when it comes to vehicle service this year, just below average, and far behind leaders like Subaru, Mini, and Honda.
That begs the obvious question: Why is there a worker shortage at Ford? When asked, Farley didn’t exactly give the most direct answer:
Well, it’s a complicated problem, but there is, let’s put it that way. There are literally a million openings right now. At Ford, we have probably 6,000 [open positions]—400,000 repair technician shortages across the economy. I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, the productivity has not caught up with the white collar [positions], in fact, it’s gone down over the last 20 years. Number two, the jobs aren’t as glamorous as a white-collar job from college, and I think the permitting and all the regulations has really stunted the growth of these kind of jobs.
By now, you’re probably screaming at your computer, telling Ford they should just offer adequate wages, and the workers will come rushing in. The commenters under Yahoo Finance’s post on Instagram are doing as much. But that might be more of an industry-wide problem than just a Ford problem, at least going by data gathered by job board Indeed. According to the job posting website, the average base salary for an automotive mechanic is $28.40 per hour, just a few cents lower than the average salary for a Ford dealership mechanic. By these numbers, Ford is about on par with the rest of the industry, salary-wise.
If you want to make a great wage at a dealership fixing cars these days, you have to become a technician, differentiating yourself with certifications and brand-specific technical training. And that costs money. Even if you graduate from a trade school, you usually still need extra training to learn how to work on the latest and greatest vehicles. That’s basically what Tom Butman, general manager of Gene Butman Ford in Ypsilanti, Michigan, told the Detroit Free Press earlier this year:
“Technology has exploded with complexity. That’s one of the things that a lot people don’t think about when they think ‘Why do we have a technician shortage?’ ” Butman said. “It’s because technology has complicated the repair process to the point where it’s much more difficult to repair cars.”
Even with a degree from a trade program, Butman said, much of the higher level technical training falls to dealers and automakers. He said some of his best technicians never went to college; rather the dealership invested in training them and getting them certified.
To its credit, Ford has invested in making this process easier. Since 2023, the company has funded the Auto Tech Scholarship program, which, as of 2025, awards $4 million a year to people studying to become service technicians. According to another Free Press article published earlier this week, Farley has even established a task force “to come up with ways to foster the development of more skilled trades people to address the shortage” after meeting with dealers earlier this year.
Whether either of these initiatives will result in shorter wait times and higher customer satisfaction is unclear. In any case, they are steps in the right direction.
[Update: A previous version of this story quoted Farley as saying Ford had 400,000 open technician positions, when in reality, it was 6,000 positions. That’s been corrected. My bad! -BS]
Top photo: Ford
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They’ve been complaining about the tech shortage for literally 40 years.
Friend of mine in the 80s decided he wanted to teach auto repair instead of wrenching himself, so he went back to school for a teaching degree. Did his semester of student teaching and noped out. Schools were putting the less than bright kids into vocational classes, and even back then auto repair was becoming more intellectually challenging.
Gotta be worse now
Wait until you hear about the aviation technician shortage
Farley the usual blah blah blah… Anyhow, being a tech these days is terrible, I know a couple. Buy your own tools, book time is fine when it’s easy but with tech and computer fest not great when things go sideways. A lot of turnover too, so learning new stuff when people go round and round between dealers. Never mind these dealerships groups (cartels) playing games with job reimbursement… Layer in the bizzaroland of the dealership franchise model. What’s the incentive to get people into a job as a dealership tech? Not much…
I love having and buying tools; I won’t pretend that I don’t.
But if I hadn’t spent at least $2,000* to add on top of my home tools (with the fun aside that every automotive tool I own is now living at the shop), I’d never manage a single job in flag time. If someone described the job to you without actually disclosing the work involved, you’d walk away in disgust as they ask you to front thousands of dollars for things you have to have to remotely have a chance at making the money back. It reads like a pyramid scheme, or just a straight up scam.
*Impact wrench (battery, since we don’t have enough air lines for techs to work in tandem), additional breaker bars, ratcheting wrenches, cart, organization for the cart, specialty tools (screw/nut/bolt extractors, lug stud puller, serpentine belt tool, brake service kit, half-size lug sockets, oddball bits and sockets – I see you, e-torx, thin walls for stupid aftermarket wheels, brake pad and brake rotor gauges, work lights, consumables like brushes, lubricants/greases). And those are just the things I bought after my “if I have to ask to borrow a tool three times, go buy it” rule.
Because Ford cut the labor times a lot about maybe 8-9 years ago. Everyone quit then.
I work for Firestone Complete Auto Care and I make $21 an hour flag time.
To get paid for the 30-hour floor of work, I have to work 40 hours, *unless* I can bill 30+ hours of flag time in a week. This is very, very, very hard to do. If I work 95% of 40 hours, I get paid 95% of **30** hours.
So far this year I have had stolen from me by Firestone Complete Auto Care about 100 hours of unpaid labor.
You have a technician shortage? No. Fix your fucking wages for the people doing the work. I gross $630 a week. Show me a rent/mortgage, groceries, utilities, and a modest car payment that fits in $2520 (gross, remember) a month and I’ll show you a fucking unicorn. Don’t even talk to me about savings or retirement.
Something that people who keep railing on the premise that everyone should spurn college and go to trade school forgets, is that average wage is a shitty way to chose a career path. If you want to emerge from poverty anyway.
The real question is, what is the ceiling? If I work hard to be the best I can be, will I be rewarded? What are the opportunities for growth? Will I be able to thrive in a way that I can provide a better life for my kids than was provided for me? Or will, in this case, I be in a job where 25$ a hour is about as good as I can do and will my industry fight me tooth and nail for any sort of salary gain?
The wages for technicians suck and the job is difficult. If Farley, who’s been a total asshat about these types of discussions by the way, really wants a blue collar workforce, he can choose to respect technicians by paying them. Until then he doesn’t give a fuck.
Being a tech is a horrible job. It’s long hours, hard on your body, requires your own tools, you have to work under wet vehicles all winter, and the flat rate pay has not kept up with inflation. Not only that, but also the book times are terrible now, and software updated can take hours on end to perform. I worked at a dealership 12 years ago, and there’s only 3 or 4 techs out of 40 that are still there. Most have moved into construction, Oil/Gas, public works, and breweries (I’m in Colorado)
You’ve gotta love a brake job that pays 0.8 hours, but takes 45 minutes of learning how to put the car in service mode to disable the electronic parking brake before you’ve touched a single piece of hardware. (Electronic parking brake adds 0.2 hours, which is the equivalent of spitting in your coffee and calling it a refill.)
Mitchell is absolutely nasty with respect to times. The courtesy checks we do on every car pay 0.1 hours (six minutes) to check:
– mileage (many modern cars hide the odometer, mind you)
– VIN
– cracked windshield
– missing wheel hardware
– scratches/dents
– warning lights on?
– windshield wipers
– all headlights work
– all mini lights work
– air filter
– cabin air filter
– PCV valve
– washer fluid
– brake fluid level
– brake fluid quality
– coolant system
– coolant level/quality
– oil level (many modern luxury cars don’t have dipsticks)
– accessory belts
– battery terminal condition
– battery test
– power steering fluid level
– take a break! Just kidding, rack and lift the car
– measure air pressure all tires
– measure tread depth all tires
And you’re required to take pictures of anything marked red/urgent, and the camera frequently takes 10-20 seconds to focus. God help you if it’s a car that needs lots of work (and so requires lots of pictures). That time is coming, literally, out of your paycheck.
It’s so perverse, your reward for all that is that hopefully someone will buy a service, and then you hope to hell you can do the work faster than Mitchell time and maybe you’ll have a shot at getting paid at least for the time you worked that day. And it is absolutely grinding the shit out of my body. I’m ready for bed an hour after work, and when I can sleep I sleep until five minutes before I have to leave.
I love my work but I hate my job.
That really isn’t enough money anymore considering the cost of living nowadays.I know dealers have overhead costs but that’s just not enough considering the training and specialization required.Where I am a laborer is making about 15% more money than the average mechanic.And they wonder why there is a tech shortage.
Does this mean Galpin Ford can spare an unused service bay for David Tracy projects?
Different industry (engineering), but I manage a program where we hire some brand new engineers straight out of school every year and pay them a full-fledged engineering salary for a year of intensive training. Then I manage them for another three to four years doing support until they promote out and become more senior engineers. I’ve only had two people leave in eight years.
Invest in your people, pay them decently, treat them fairly, and you just might be able to keep them around.
This. Different industry here too, but a problem much like this shortage, company won’t put enough into training and retaining talent. Constant turnover, end up hiring folks with some basic knowledge, hoping they pick it up. Once they do, they’re gone for a better position.
ISTR reading that customers pay the book rate, but techs get paid per piece. Maybe that’s why?
“Well, it’s a complicated problem,”
And I think that’s a lie. I think the problem is likely very simple… they are not offering enough pay and they are not doing enough to fund apprenticeships for people to become mechanics.
Like many other lazy-assed companies, they want all the skill and experience for bottom-dollar.
And the shortage is essentially due to many mechanics sending a big “Fuck You” to the company.
The solution is NOT complicated.
It’s simple.
In the short term, offer higher wages to attract more candidates.
In the long term, start funding a lot more apprenticeships. How many? Start with looking at how many existing mechanics are likely to retire in the next 5 years and adjust the number UP from there.
It would also help if they didn’t make stupid engineering decisions that caused more warranty work… idiotic stuff like wet timing belts, wet oil pump belts and poorly designed transmissions like the PowerShit.
This is NOT complicated stuff to figure out.
Thank you for pushing back on that reductive canard. It is not complicated. That’s just what actual lazy people at the top use to muddy the waters around the ugly facts of “we don’t pay people enough so that we may have more money for ourselves.” What was Farley’s comp last year? Give half of that to your entire technician workforce and watch your employee retention and customer satisfaction go up. Fuckin duh.
The execs seem to want supply and demand to only work in their favor. Auto OEMs understand this, obviously, since dealer surcharges exist as well as manufacturers rebates. Except they conveniently forget it when it comes to labor all the time.